


Bride of Thanos

by sailaway



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom
Genre: Discipline, F/M, Fluff and Smut, Harems, Power Dynamics, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Size Difference, Size Kink, Spanking, Worship, in which the infinity gauntlet gets used for some fuckery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-13
Updated: 2018-05-13
Packaged: 2019-05-05 22:54:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,901
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14628747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sailaway/pseuds/sailaway
Summary: The titan's hands span her waist with ease, thumbs meeting over navel and forefingers over spine. “Do you shiver from cold or from fear, priestess?”“Both,” she blurts, before she can consider whether raw honesty is the safest path.“I know a remedy to ease both conditions.” His voice holds depth and promise. “Remove your robes.”





	Bride of Thanos

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah, I wrote Thanos smut. It's not quite porn-without-plot, but the plot is thin, and I glossed over things to focus on the juicy stuff. Is it even in character? Who knows! Enjoy this mish-mash of scenes anyway!

 

* * *

 

 

A young woman cowers in the mountain temple, the noise of distant destruction wafting on a blithe breeze into the open courtyard. There are things in the sky, monstrous things, undulating goliaths that rain chaos on the tiny, rustic planet.

Wordlessly she calls to the Goddess as she runs inside, fumbling with the wooden prayer beads looped around her wrist. Her diaphanous robes billow in a pool of a dozen shades of blue as she sinks to her knees behind Her statue, inundated by the scent of incense and offerings left by petitioners – pungent flowers, sweet cakes –

From the corner of her eye, through the gossamer hood draped loosely over close-cropped bronze hair, she sees a figure – very tall, very large, very strange, in a gleaming gold helm and armor. A foreign invader violating this holy sanctuary.

She stares at the mosaic floor and lets fly with a string of monotone pleas and curses. With heavy footsteps he circles in front of her. “Goddess, may you smite him where he stands, and it is Your will for me to die this day, bring me swiftly into your presence – ”

“Tell me,” the stranger intones. His voice is deep but, given the circumstances, absurdly pleasant. “Are you the high priestess of this place?”

Her last shred of courage fails her. “I... I am but the Goddess' acolyte.”

Even going down into a crouch, he towers over her kneeling form. He is a colossus of a man, if a man is what he is, with arms thicker than her waist and boots made to crush skulls. As he extends one massive hand – she flinches, bracing for violence – and lifts the sheer fabric away she realizes it is not the indigo veil tinting his features mauve, but his own natural coloring.

“Your sisters have fled.” He seems mildly interested to see how she'll respond to that. His eyes are like pale moonstones. “You are all that remains.”

She swallows hard, shaking despite the warmth from the braziers flanking the alcove.

“What do they call you?” he presses.

“Dezhda.”

“Dezhda.” He says her name as if it were a curio turned over in his hand, held up to the light. “Will you serve your goddess still, and her alone?”

“My devotion is all I have left.”

He leans in a little, as if divulging a secret. “There are other masters.”

Dezhda's faith is strong, but her instinct for self-preservation is stronger.

 

 

* * *

 

 

She's never been out of atmosphere before now and the ship's rapid ascent, and accompanying change in pressure, leaves her woozy. The next thing she knows she is being carried – not by the individual named Thanos, someone else – into another ship, gargantuan beyond description, dwarfing the previous craft tenfold.

Where her home-world is warm and airy and blooming with color, this place is a dim wash of nothing but gray. A guilty pang in her belly, at the thought of her flight from that blue-green orb. Precisely who (what, why) this conqueror is is still a blank for her.

But she's alive.

Dezhda lies in the center of an enormous oval bed, a stark contrast to the spartan pallet that had been allotted to her in the temple. This sleeping chamber is vast but low-ceilinged, the walls lined with inset shelves displaying cryptic artifacts and thick-bound tomes.

Thanos has at some point divested himself of the ornate armor, and the gold collar of his sleeveless tunic glints in the low light. He stands at the end of the bed, his weight to one side.

“Have you known a man?”

She understands his meaning.

“The Goddess does not... require chastity from her disciples.” Her response is tremulous. “On each equinox festival, engagement in... physical love is a very worthy offering to Her, though only on those permitted days, and with priests of her God consort, whose temple lies on the peak directly across the valley...”

He doesn't interrupt her rambling, and speaks only when she trails off. His tone is indulgent. “Will your Goddess make an exception?”

“I believe She knows our hearts – ” Her stammer knifes into a squeak as he takes hold of her ankles in one hand and with a swift tug pulls her to the end of the bed. Her focus on the rocky ceiling is resolute. “She understands our motivations, and unique circumstances...”

He is impossible to block from her peripheral vision. Her gauzy skirts are hiked up her body, slow and steady. Goosebumps prickle her exposed legs.

“A very understanding deity,” he rumbles knowledgeably. His hands span her waist with ease, thumbs meeting over navel and forefingers over spine. “Do you shiver from cold or from fear, priestess?”

“Both,” she blurts, before she can consider whether honesty is the safest path.

“I know a remedy to ease both conditions.” His voice holds depth and promise. “Remove your robes.”

He tracks her wriggling as she unwinds her sash, the thin layers of fabric parting. He pushes the robes aside completely to reveal her dusky breasts, pulls them down her arms to uncover the ritual tattoos swirling from shoulders to elbows, leaving her naked before him in a froth of blue.

Swept with sudden self-consciousness she makes to cross her knees to shield her modesty, but he slips a muscular thigh between her legs to prevent it. The soft nap of his trousers is tantalizing on her chilled skin, her buttocks a sublime fit in the curve of his palms. He looms over, watching the expressions play out across her face.

Without preamble he kneels and bends his head between her thighs, drawing the flat of his tongue – as proportionately large as the rest of him – up her sex. She gasps despite herself, making fists in the plush coverlet and biting off the sound.

“Don't be shy,” he murmurs into her. His mouth is soft and skilled, winding her up, and when his tongue plunges inside he at last wrings a cry from her.

“There you go.” His low praise is almost soothing, the syllables a hum against her most intimate place. She risks a glance down at him, her cheeks flaming, to see a subtle but benevolent smirk in his blue-gray gaze.

His forefinger alone has to be bigger than a normal man's cock, and when the pad of it grazes her slick channel her breath catches, body going taut as every sense hones in on it.

“Does this worship please your gods?”

“I...”

“Does it please you?”

“Y-yesss,” she moans weakly, and having coaxed this confession he slides his finger in up to the first knuckle. Without thinking she grabs his biceps, fingertips stuttering over the even lines that score his skin here and there.

From the lustful tick of his jaw she knows it is more than permissible to touch him. He makes a low noise of satisfaction as with his continuing attentions she jolts upright, bowing forward, breasts brushing his smooth scalp. She pants as he strokes her inner walls, any past reticence dissolving in the fires of pleasure, and his clear eyes narrow in satisfaction at her helpless response.

The total possession of his palm cupping her sex has her gasping, clutching his broad shoulders, thighs clenching around his thick wrist as the heel of his hand grinds onto her clit. Her breath comes short and fast as her skin flushes, fingers shaking where they dig into him, hips bucking in desperate response to his unfaltering rhythm.

When she comes she collapses forward, head lolling on this stranger's shoulder. He doesn't retreat from it, letting her ride out the aftershocks in the shelter of his circling arms.

She should feel shame for basking in ignorant bliss with an unknown conqueror, leaving her planet behind in shambles. She's not entirely sure what happened before she was whisked away, and she can't decide if she can bear to ask or know. Maybe that's selfish; maybe just practical.

She won't dwell on that now. His breadth is so warm, so sturdy. It says, worry no more. So she listens.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Dezhda learns several things very quickly – the first is that her collection, for lack of a better word, is not an singular incident. There are other women aboard the ship, women who stand out from the cronies and warriors and underlings: pretty, graceful, well-groomed. It makes sense, when she thinks about it – she's not special enough to be the first to catch the warlord's eye, to be spared from his path of controlled demolition – but she's still taken aback by her unexpected addition to a harem.

The second, is that the “brides of Thanos” are not ornamental. She is given jobs to do.

That's alright. She's good at jobs.

The brides bicker among themselves less than she would have predicted. Maybe because their rooms are separate and their tasks keep them occupied, often away from the ship entirely. Perhaps it's just to avoid word getting back to Thanos – she doesn't think he'd bring himself to care if they fought, but he would if he had to hear complaints, or if sour moods affected his relaxation. Maybe he just has a talent for choosing women who are a cut above such pettiness.

Do they ever feel jealousy?

Dezhda doesn't... not right away. At the start she feels only gratitude for having escaped with her life, and her priority is to maintain that state and keep her head down. In serving Thanos' pleasure she finds her own, and all the better that he treats her well. But he's undoubtedly like that with all of the others, too. She can ask no more.

But over time envy begins to sear, like a festering sore, a splinter lodged just under her ribs. As best she can she buries it, like dirt thrown on a fire.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“Please,” she begs. “Do I not serve you well, master?”

He chucks her under the chin. “Use my name.”

“Thanos.”

Sprawled in the middle of his bed she locks her legs around his waist, trailing her fingers over the nape of his neck, the idle caress of the faithful. His arousal juts through his trousers, the pressure an unbearable torture against the apex of her thighs. She shifts herself on him, cat-like. Every pleasure of the flesh imaginable they had partaken of, except one, and she burns with desire to have him inside her; to have him take her at last.

The vast mismatch in size, though, deprives them of that.

“I like you too well to ruin you.” He sifts a hand through the burnished copper of her hair, grown out past her collarbones now.

“You won't.”

“Stubborn.” He puts two fingers to her lips, silencing her.

“Then let me attend you.” She wriggles off him and unbuckles his heavy belt.

Parallel lines ring his cock, a maze for her to follow. Her fingers don't meet around the shaft and he takes himself in hand as she lavishes kisses on the tip, generous with her tongue, stretching her lips over as far as she can and sucking until her mouth comes off with an obscene pop.

With a growl he tosses her back onto the bed, pumping his length for several careless strokes before flipping her onto her belly and hauling her up onto all fours. She sighs, wanton, as his cock slides over her needy folds – not entering, not giving her what is physically impossible but that she craves nonetheless. Instead he thrusts slickly between her closed thighs, the thick veins pulsing against her; enticing, taunting.

He comes on her back, spurt after hot spurt, and as he exhales and ruffles her hair he says huskily, “Patience.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

“What troubles you?” he asks one evening, after she's returned from a mission and he's summoned her to his chambers for a report.

“I'm only tired from my journey,” Dezhda lies, with a tractable smile.

He just gives her a look.

“Again, but with no deception this time,” Thanos says, not unkindly.

She admits, with cheeks stained a humiliated crimson, exactly where her mind wanders on those nights when she's absent, when she sinks into another bed at the hospitality of some tycoon or dignitary – who Thanos entertains himself with, who might make him laugh, who touches the same places she does and whispers honeyed flattery to gain his favor.

He seems amused, but there's no cruelty in it.

“My children are my enforcers, and you, my brides, my informants. I value each of you,” he responds diplomatically. He didn't have to deign to answer her at all, and despite the subject it fills her with blooming contentment that he does. “You know some were given to me, and it would be detrimental to rudely refuse a gift from a beneficial ally. Many of you, yourself included, have unique skills that are an advantage to me. Ankhe has her aptitude for languages, Tassia that rather convenient trick of sensing another's emotions.”

Dezhda won't ask about herself. She won't. She nods in generic thoughtfulness.

The titan tips her chin up. “And in who else could I find such loyalty? Have you ever quailed at a task I have set you? Ever wavered in your faith?”

“You know I have not.”

He softens, like he has more fond assurances to unravel for her; but something in his countenance withdraws, as if prudently cutting himself off.

It occurs to Dezhda, later, that Tassia has never seemed to like her. She wonders what the other bride senses in her; or in Thanos.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“Dezhda.” He makes her name into a chastening. “Your demeanor of late disturbs me.”

She chews her tongue, avoiding looking at him reclined in his immense chair. The cavernous throne room is uncharacteristically empty, an organic and cold cathedral with a single penitent come to the altar.

He doesn't speak again until she relents and meets his eyes. “Your time cavorting on Ibus B has fogged your resolve and sharpened your tongue.” His indictment is casual, but the low enunciation of each syllable is incisive. “You return long past your scheduled arrival date, you treat my instructions like suggestions – ”

“Isn't cavorting what you sent me to do? Endear myself to politicians, amuse generals, charm financiers, float around banquets and parties with my ears open?”

“That's true, but when I send out an obedient girl, I expect the same to come back.” His tone remains level. Even his sigh is measured. “Maybe I've spoiled you. Your comforts make you lax. Where is my Dezhda who never refused me, who was eager for my command, who recognized her service to me as the privilege it is?”

_My Dezhda._ Even addressed so sternly, the primal heart of her kindles at his words.

Perhaps she has become distracted. Luxuries are seductive, her jaunts to cosmopolitan cultures and palatial pleasure barges luring her from duty. She could no more fit herself back into the role of provincial innocent, stammering rube, than a chick could shrink back into the egg... but deep down, wherever her essence lay, remained the desire to please; to revere; to serve. And as if a tangible cord tethered her and Thanos, she could never truly stray.

“Right here,” she mumbles, suddenly developing a keen interest in the stone floor.

“Speak up.” He beckons without moving anything but his fingers.

She mounts the steps until she stands before him, almost between his spread legs. “I'm still here.”

He pats his knee. Relieved at his prompt forgiveness, she moves as if to curl up on his lap, but he shakes his head.

“No.” He takes her in, then spins one finger in an upright semi-circle, landing on his knee again.

Realization reddens her like a sunburn.

Her hands inch down, gathering hesitant wads of her skirts, and begin to tug them up. The tip of his chin is a confirmation.

“I consider myself tolerant to a point,” he contemplates, as if she isn't arranging herself, nude ass bared, over his knees. “Until now you've always met – exceeded – my expectations. Your devotion was matchless. I think it still must be.”

His palm ghosts over the backs of her thighs, the other secure across her shoulder blades. His voice drops in timbre. “I know you like it when I speak to you that way. I do, too. So I'm going to ensure we won't have any repeats of this isolated episode.”

His trousers are fitted enough that she cannot grip the fabric for purchase. The long rope of her braid swings down by her face. Adrenaline stings, apprehension churns, her belly constricting –

She vows to take her discipline in silence yet the first spank rips a shriek from her, the contact harder than she'd braced for. His touch could be feather-gentle, or as strict and relentless as a lash of lightning. She's never been on the receiving end of the latter before.

He's gracious enough to give her time to stifle her traitorous mouth against his thigh before he delivers another blow. His single hand spans over both hot, smarting buttocks.

Thanos makes every strike count: pausing between each, then connecting with crisp and unflagging force. Her every muscle and tendon is rigid, her features screwed up tight. The eleventh is the worst – with a whimper of despair she has to accept that he's going to keep on past ten until fifteen, twenty. But the pause stretches out, further and further, and with a cool swell of gratitude she realizes he's not just making her wait. He's meted out her penance.

Dezhda goes boneless and he scoops her up, setting her lightly on her feet between his knees. Her skirts rustle back down again, the fabric, despite its silky fibers, chafing her reprimanded backside.

He smooths her mussed braid, then grazes her cheek with the back of his hand. After what he'd done the calm affection in his expression seems incongruous, but like light spilling over the land at sunrise it suffuses her with warmth.

Acting on some base and humble need, her eyes drift shut and she turns into his touch. There is no chill beneath her feet, no lingering burn of her punishment, only the all-encompassing curve of his hand.

“Go now, bride of mine.” She hears him lean forward, feels the firm press of his kiss on her forehead. “I have obligations, and will see you when I am able.”

As Dezhda exits – gingerly, but straight-backed – down the walkway and out of the throne room, she over-analyzes the meaning of a man laden with responsibilities and powerful beyond imagination assuring her, one of many paramours and countless subordinates at his beck and call, that he would be with her when he could.

 

 

* * *

 

 

He's done it.

Ash mars the ship's long corridors, gray on gray, shouts echoing hollow. Faces peek out of offices and private quarters, staring blankly at each other, taking stock of who remains.

Several realizations hit Dezhda like a bomb – that half the population of the universe has vanished in an instant, and that she's still standing. A funny figure of speech, given that her legs almost give out, and she settles for slumping against the wall, fixated on a sooty smear that less than a minute ago was an armed guard.

She knows it could have gone the other way. That she'd be the one reduced to so much inert dust on the ground. But she trusted Thanos' vision, long ago let herself surrender to it: what will be, will be. If anything she admires his fairness, that he would not selfishly spare anyone for himself.

(Had he not been so committed to impartiality, so noble in his aim, would he have chosen to set her apart from his cull? She dares to think, _maybe._ )

She does not see him for many more days. What he's doing, she hasn't the faintest notion: but that's why he is who he is, and how he accomplishes what he does. It frightens her, and fascinates her, as if he is more deity than man. There isn't a word for what he is. There is only awe, laced through with ribbons of adoration.

It's early morning, still quiet, and she's yet to change out of her sleeping clothes when the door to her rooms opens with no warning. Only one person is permitted to do that.

When Thanos' tired eyes find her across the small space there's a shift in his posture, an alertness, a near-imperceptible slackening of the tense set of his shoulders. His lips part. The air leaves Dezhda in a rush.

And then she flies at him, collapsing into his chest as he goes down on one knee to meet her. His embrace is tight enough to make the blood rush to her head.

“Dezhda.” His voice is weary, her name little more than an exhalation. Not for the first time she wishes she had Tassia's ability to read people – but she imagines that even without it, she can read Thanos now. He smells of ozone, the tinny tang of space travel, indicating he's only just arrived on board and has come straight to her. 

“You're hurt,” she breathes, hovering a tentative hand over the damaged slope of his arm, crazed with singed, jagged furrows. Though his magnificent gauntlet is likewise charred and battered, each slot is filled now, and it buoys her up with pride for him. The gems' innocent glitter belies their cosmic, universe-changing possibilities.

“I am healing.” His correction is muffled in her hair.

She peppers agitated kisses on his jaw, his cheek, his neck, straddling his thigh as he secures her with his unharmed forearm against her back. Her grip on his shoulders is fervent, a pilgrim at the shrine. It's almost inaudible but she hears him wince.

“Oh, I'm sorry, I'm hurting you...”

“You could not.” The low solemnity of his assurance makes her think he doesn't mean his injury. His eyes hold the unwavering clarity of the twin moons of her home-world. But where those had been distant, impassive, he was wholly and intensely present. “But your concern is welcome, priestess.”

The pet name has lingered, though Dezhda hasn't been one of those for a long time now. Was it some other lifetime she'd been spirited away from that bucolic mountain temple? But still she worships; her nature is ever devout. Her new god requires absolute piety, and it is no sacrifice at all to give it.

She takes his face in reverent hands and kisses his mouth. There's a size disparity but not enough to hinder them and as the kiss deepens they melt together, snow in the sun. She's unable to douse the heat sparking in her core, can't stop herself from tipping her pelvis forward just a bit to rub on his thigh.

He notices, of course.

The relief of their reunion is replaced with a more elemental energy as he flattens his hand against the small of her back.

“There is nothing off limits to me now,” he murmurs. She assumes he speaks merely of what he has accomplished. But when he rises, boosting her up around his waist with ease, and takes her to the bed, she realizes he must have something else in mind entirely.

His weight on her is familiar and as delicious as always, his hands as expansive and purposeful, but there's a different quality to his movements: a vehemence, a hunger, that she isn't sure she can recall even in their most passionate encounters.

One moment they're both clothed and the next, they aren't. She starts at the press of his bare skin on her, bewildered at the sudden disappearance of separating fabric, the only thing on his body now is the shining gauntlet –

One of the stones is glowing and then she understands, with an amazed smile, what he's done – that this instrument of infinite power can be used even for such trifles.

“Come astride me,” he commands in a rasp. “It will go easier for you.”

Abruptly his intention is clear, and her stomach flips. She's coveted this for so long, yearned for this initiation, thrilling to the anticipation and twining eager arms around his neck.

She coordinates with him as he rolls, straddling him as he sits back against the headboard and drags one of the gauntlet's metallic digits along her hipbone. There's a curious deflation inside her, an effervescence that plumes like the pocket between gusts of wind.

“What are you doing,” she gasps, riveted by the ruby-red glow on his gilded knuckles.

His chuckle is feral, the celestial silver of his stare enraptured. “Rearranging some things.”

It's hard to catch her breath, and she doesn't know if it's from excitement or whatever he's done to her. She's dripping wet already, flooded with heat – did he do that, too? – and she savors the slide against the thick velvet length of him. But he isn't in the mood for foreplay and he takes hold of her – one hand warm flesh, the other unyielding metal – and flattens her against his chest, angling her to align her entrance with his waiting cock.

The head alone is as wide as her two fists together and as it spreads her she tenses, electric anticipation giving way to anxiety. She steels herself for the spear of pain, the shock of tearing tissues – instead there is only overwhelming, delirious completion as he surges up into her, impaling her in one sure drive up. His jaw slackens, then snaps shut again with a hiss. She can feel every inch of him, stretching her just shy of the threshold of pain, filling her up like water fitting in a vessel, as if her insides have been sculpted out just for him.

They're both heedless of her nails marking his shoulders as she shifts atop him. He meets her movement, hips flexing up to sheathe himself to the hilt, and a cry scrapes out of her. She'd swear she could feel him in her ribcage, under her sternum, at her very heart.

He allows her experimental motions as she adjusts to him but impatience strains his self-discipline, the entire bulk of him all but vibrating with need. Their height difference leaves her eye-level with his clavicle and she lets her forehead fall forward against him, trembling at the sheer deluge of sensation. Her fingers follow the well-tread striae on his skin, the lines arcing down and vee-ing together where they're joined. She clenches onto the ridges of muscle to anchor her rhythm, rolling against him, shuddering at the exquisite twinned torment of the stimulation to her clit and his cock hitting her deepest parts.

But Thanos lacks his customary control and he takes over, hands corseting her waist, rocking her body the way he wants. His eyes are heavy-lidded yet fixed on hers like a targeting system as he fucks up into her, ravenous and rough as if even stuffing her completely isn't enough. Each thrust jerks a whine from her, the sound choked off as he bottoms out, the sob of the drowning – maybe she is drowning. In him, in the radiance of their passion, in the way he stares at her as if in revelation.

His bare hand releases her to tangle in her hair, yanking it back, and as he buries his face in her neck her climax overtakes her – she shudders against him, a scream hitching out in strangled shards, pounding blood an engine's roar in her ears. He pistons up once, twice more, then through clenched teeth groans into her quivering jugular, his arm a vice around her back, the gauntlet's hard edges digging in. His hips are a fierce grind against hers, his release pumping deep inside, her own body fluttering around the throb of his cock.

Panting, feeling his own unsteady breath on her throat, she feels divine, profound; and yet primeval and grounded, all at once. Has she ever felt so safe? So right? She has wings; she has roots.

She can't tell him she loves him. The phrase is maudlin, insufficient; but she's sure he knows. He must. The same way she knows, on raw instinct, that he was relieved to see her alive.

He hasn't let her go.

“Now you're crushing me,” Dezhda manages through a compressed ribcage, though it's difficult to speak at all, so full of his cock.

Thanos mutters his contrition and his rigidity dissipates. Her own limbs are languorous, saturated in a dizzy glow, and it's too much of an effort to separate from him. He does it for her, lifting her off, doll-like – her inner walls are sore but reluctant to let go. There's that odd foamy feeling inside again and a snug, fluid cinching, as if her organs are tucking into the appropriate places again.

He settles her sideways on his lap, her legs crossed at the ankles over his hip as she rests one ear on his middle. His heart rate is faster than she would have guessed, the fundamental beat of it a sensuous hymn: to the death he wreaks, to the life he creates space for, to coming rebirth. To power, and vulnerability. To the pursuit, to the surrender: to love.

He strokes her hair, crown to ends. It nearly reaches her tailbone now. She feels small and delicate and strong in his arms.

“My treasure,” he murmurs. His voice is thick. “The things we'll do together.”

She can't wait to find out what he means.

 

 

* * *

 

 


End file.
